Time for Signalgate squad to lawyer up
The Signalgate squad potentially committed serious federal crimes with very long statutes of limitations -- and Senate Republicans have opened the door to investigations of the billowing scandal.
Anyone close to Pete Hegseth, Michael Waltz, Tulsi Gabbard, JD Vance, or any of the rest of the Signalgate squad should be telling them to retain criminal defense counsel. Immediately.
Yes, they are still very much in denial mode, falsely claiming that the group chat did not contain any classified defense material (when in fact it shared details about the bombing before it occurred, and referred to an active, covert CIA operative, among other things), or lashing out at Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, or just trying to claim that the whole thing is some sort of liberal, deep-state “hoax.”
But none of that is working. The texts are out there for everyone to read. Goldberg delivered the receipts. And even Republicans have, well, signaled that an investigation is merited.
And there are deadly serious legal ramifications for these officials.
1 - There are multiple federal criminal statutes implicated here - and they carry statutes of limitations of 5 to 10 years.
If you were wondering whether the Signalgate squad may have broken any laws as they recklessly texted about attack plans and covert CIA activity and put our service members and intelligence officers at risk, the answer is why yes, why yes they quite possibly did.
Let’s start with the biggest piece of legal jeopardy for all of these officials, 18 U.S.C. 793(f), part of the Espionage Act,1 which states in relevant part:
Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing … plan … note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust … or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust … and fails to make prompt report of such loss … to his superior officer … [s]hall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
There is no question that the attack plans constituted information relating to the national defense2 — and there is no question that this information was not in its proper place of custody (i.e. secure government systems) and that it was, in fact, delivered to Goldberg, who was not authorized to receive it. And there is an excellent argument that placing all of this information on a Signal group chat was perhaps the very textbook definition of the term “gross negligence,” though I could think of quite a few other more colorful characterizations of that misconduct.
To break this down even further, the word “negligence” is a legal term of art, meaning a failure to meet a duty of care that a reasonable person would carry out under the circumstances. As for “gross negligence,” it refers to an extreme departure from that duty of care, with a reckless disregard for that duty and/or for the lives and safety of others.
I would argue that the Signal text threads constitute a clear dereliction of the duties of these officials — and an appallingly reckless disregard for the safety and lives of our service members and intelligence officers.
Moreover, everyone on the thread is also potentially guilty of subsection (2) of the above statute — because they all had obvious knowledge that the defense information was illegally removed from its proper place of custody, and thus they all had a legal obligation to report the situation to their superior officer, namely the president, and it does not appear that anyone did so.
The entirety of 18 U.S.C. 793 is subject to a 10-year statute of limitations, so even if the Trump administration is too corrupt and self-serving to do anything about this, future administrations could investigate and indict the perpetrators.3
While that may be the gravest source of legal jeopardy for the Signalgaters, it is not the only one. There are a litany of federal laws and regulations around the proper maintenance of records, including the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014, which explicitly extended the laws on federal records to electronic communications and would seem to cover the Signalgate situation perfectly. These laws also have criminal penalties — and they carry a 5-year statute of limitations that can be extended to 10 years if the misconduct involves fraud.
2 - Even Republicans in the Senate have begun indicating that investigations are warranted.
There is a more near-term legal threat gathering for the Signalgate squad, however. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (who, remember, was not the choice of the hardcore MAGA folks, who preferred Rick Scott) has noted that “mistakes were made” and suggested that the Senate Armed Services Committee may want to investigate the matter.
The chair of Armed Services is Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi4 — and he’s now joining with the ranking Democrat on the committee, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, to call for an expedited inspector general report on the scandal.
This is not the same as calling for hearings, or creating a special committee to investigate not only the Signal chat on the Yemen bombing but also to get to the bottom of how many other Signal chats may exist among senior governmental officials — constituting a blatant and horrendous breach of national security and all the aforementioned federal laws.
But it’s a start. And critically, the role of inspector general at a slew of federal agencies has now fallen to an array of acting inspectors general — because Trump purported to fire 17 of the IGs. And those acting IGs are not Trump loyalist hacks. They are career public officials who have served both Republican and Democratic administrations (including, most recently, that of President Biden), and generally, the IGs and their teams are serious people (unlike the Trumpers, or Logan Roy’s children); they are duty-bound to uphold the rules even when no one else will, to stand up to even the most powerful officials in their departments.
This all may get far more interesting — and soon. And once those IG reports are in, if they find that the senior officials broke the law, there could well be enough of an outcry that senators like Wicker and Thune5 will go forward with hearings in the Senate — at which point the Signalgaters will be hauled in to testify under oath.6
So, yeah. I’d say it’s time for these folks to lawyer up, don’t you think?
If this sounds familiar, it should be. 18 U.S.C. 793 is one of the statutes that Trump was indicted under in the Mar-a-Lago documents case; there the key provision was from 18 U.S.C. 793(e), alleging that Trump had unauthorized possession of defense information and willfully retained it after its return was demanded. The apples do not fall very far from the tree.
An important note here: the “information” in question is not just limited to the timing of the strikes and the intelligence and so forth. “Information” is much broader than that, and it encompasses all of the chatter about internal discussions within the administration and involving the president, plus the international implications with regard to other powers. All of that was defense-related information, whether it was classified or not.
Yes, Trump could pardon all of them — but that would only pour another barrel of gasoline onto the flaming dumpster fire of a scandal.
This is the same Senator Wicker who recently called Vladimir Putin a war criminal and stated he should be executed, which are not exactly Trump White House talking points. So there is indeed some daylight between Wicker and Trump when it comes to international and military matters.
Why would Wicker and Thune do such things? This is a topic to delve into in a future post — but for now, let’s just remember that these folks have senior positions they have longed to reach for years, and they may not want to lay down their prerogatives so quickly.
When this occurred the other day, it was because there was already a scheduled hearing on defense and intelligence threats, and senators raised the topic. Members of both houses should continue raising Signalgate every chance they get, demanding answers on behalf of the American people. But it would of course be even more powerful if a dedicated set of hearings occurred, with bipartisan support.
Let’s stop focusing on this tip of the iceberg that included a journalist and start insisting on finding out how many other Signal groups there are.
Maybe we will find out from the security agencies of other countries.
At the DOD is the Inspector General an "acting Inspector General" or a qualified Inspector General that has returned to the position after being laid off?
Second, yesterday I learned this: "American Oversight Sues Trump Administration for Using Signal to Plan Military Operations
The lawsuit targets Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, Bessent, Rubio for violating federal records laws by using messaging app Signal for high-level national security deliberations, and seeks to recover unlawfully deleted messages and prevent further destruction."
The case was assigned to Judge James Boadberg!
I'm really familiar with Marc Elias (Democracy Docket), Democracy Forward, and CREW. I've not heard of americanoversight.org before. Here is their mission: "American Oversight is a nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog that advances truth, accountability, and democracy by enforcing the public’s right to government records."
My son, who used to work for a high-ranking Democrat in the Senate, explained to me that such conversations should be on secure phones in secure rooms called "SCIF" rooms.